Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
Amazon Digital Services LLC (
2016)
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Abstract
In this work, it is made clear:
(1) What it is to rationalize and how rationalization is possible;
(2) What it is to repress and how repression is possible;
(3) How internal conflict is possible, how it is related to anxiety and other affective states, and how internal conflict causes blindness;
(4) Why it is that conceptualized self-awareness is repression-resistant (though not repression-proof) and non-conceptualized self-awareness is not repression-resistant;
(5) How rationalization is necessary for repression and vice versa;
(6) Why rationalization is not in and of itself pathological and why, in addition, rationalization is within limits a biological necessity;
(7) Where exactly the cut-off line is between morbid and healthy rationalization;
(8) How compartmentalization and repression depend on each other, how they are similar, and how they are different;
(9) Why even though mental events are presumably mediated by physical (physiological, neural) events, psychology is not low-resolution physiology;
(10) Why, by virtue of being the one discipline whose data are themselves data, the logical structure of the discipline of psychology is unique;
(11) Why notwithstanding the last point two points, Dilthey's 'empathy-based' approach to psychology is wrong and why Hempel's narrowly positivistic analysis of psychological explanation is no less wrong,
(12) What is involved in reducing one discipline to another;
(13) What the differences are between 'access-conscious' (Freud's 'topographical' unconscious) and 'access-unconscious' (Freud's 'dynamic', i.e. repression-based, unconscious);
(14) How rationalization is involved in character-remodeling and character-degradation;
(15) What it is to sociopathize;
(16) What the differences are between the psychopath, the sociopath, and criminal;
(17) How criminosis may safeguard (while, it is true, causing some degradation of) one's personality-architecture against forces that would otherwise lead to sociopathogenesis;
(18) How Nietzsche's ethical egoism is an oblique way of saying, correctly, that unless one is true to oneself, one's morality is sham-morality and how this prima facie ethical claim is a demonstrably (and demonstrably correct) non-normative, psychological claim;
(19) What the relationship is between psychological integrity and moral integrity;
(20) Why those lacking psychological integrity can be anything more than 'reflex machines', to use Checkley’s term;
(21) What intentions are, why intentions are not identical with desires;
(22) Why Davidson's 'interpretivism' is spurious and why the same is true of all forms of functionalism;
(23) Why the Computational Theory of Mind is spurious;
(24) Why many a psychopath is regarded as a person of merit;
(25) Why some alleged solutions to the mind-body problem are non-solutions and what the merits and demerits are of Descartes' conceivability-argument for mind-body dualism.